By Michael Woyton
Because cruelty is the driving force behind many if not all of the policies of President Donald J. Felon, it is only natural that a new detention center for immigrants has a dark history of imprisoning people — more than two-thirds of whom were American citizens — during World War II.
The ICE detention center at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, opened last weekend, NBC News reported, and it will be able to hold “as many as 5,000 detainees upon its completion in the coming months,” making it the largest federal detention center in United States history.
Japanese American advocates were quick to call out using the facility because it once imprisoned people who were called “enemy aliens.”
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Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, said the use of “national security” to justify mass incarceration echoes the same thinking that led to Japanese Americans during World War II being forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned.
“It is inconceivable that the United States is once again building concentration camps, denying the lessons learned 80 years ago,” she said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said the comparison of the detention center with WWII internment camps was “deranged and lazy,” adding that the people ICE will be holding and rounding up include “murderers, MS-13 gang members, pedophiles, and rapists.”
What about the grandmothers, grandfathers, military men, sick children, farm workers and delivery people who are being kidnapped by masked gangs of thugs? Just sayin’.
An article on the ACLU website points out that temperatures in the summer in El Paso regularly rise above 100 degrees making detainees at serious risk of heat-related illness.
Not only was the camp one of several bases used during WWII for internment of Japanese Americans, as well as Italian and German immigrants, 20 years earlier during the Mexican Revolution, the base was used as a holding site for thousands of Mexican refugees.
The ACLU points out that many of them were kept in military tents and exposed to toxic chemical delousing agents, some of which were later using in Nazi gas chambers.
More recently, during the convicted felon’s first term, Fort Bliss was used to detain children who were separated from their families. Government investigators under the Biden administration said in 2021 that the children held there suffered panic attacks and other emotional distress because of improper care and inadequate staffing.
Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-16th congressional district, was elected to serve the El Paso, Texas, area, which included Fort Bliss.
She toured the East Montana Detention Facility Monday and said the massive prison cost $1.24 billion.
She said there were 1,000 men being held there. That number is expected to grow to 5,000 and will eventually include women.
Escobar took issue with the administration and others calling the people being held in Fort Bliss “the worst of the worst” or only those with final orders of removal or criminal convictions.
“[N]one of those claims are true,” she said. “It’s all about fulfilling Stephen Miller’s fantasy of departing at least a million immigrants a year.”
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Obama has given his blessing to California redistricting, now that Texas has passed its scheme create districts that will keep Democrats from getting elected to Congress.
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Lead art: Screen grab from KTSM.com via YouTube.
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